by Edgar J. Steele
December 11, 2007
Here's an email notice I just received from a correspondent:
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CompUSA going out of business. Possible big discounts starting Wednesday. Normally, when a store goes out of business, it means an "everything must go" sale, and CompUSA's will be no exception.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2704,2230322,00.asp
http://www.compusa.com/adproducts/default.asp
http://www.gearlog.com/2007/02/cheap_geek_compusa_closures_me.php
http://www.compusa.com/clearance/default.asp?N=500463&Cn=Clearance
http://www.compusaauctions.com/
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CompUSA is a big chain. Time was, this would be front-page news all over America. Bet you don't hear about it at all, except from this single email. Lots of companies this size are going under now, but you don't hear about them.
Take this as a sign of the times. GM now has negative equity of $74 per share. Ford should have gone under a year ago. When I was working in San Francisco as a financial analyst, line banks would use their loan covenants to force corporate takeovers/dissolutions when book value got low. GM's is negative, fercrissakes! Difference is, GM and Ford are too big to let go out of business - too noticeable to Americanus Stupidus.
Same thing with gas prices. That's why diesel, which always has been cheaper, now costs a bunch more than gas - they keep the gas prices low so as not to unduly alarm the sheep.
I had my wife drop the pickup off at the dealer recently, asking her to tell them to replace the glow-plug relay, which obviously had gone bad due to the hard-starting and smoking symptoms. I just found out that they charged us $253 for a part I should have bought off eBay ($40, including shipping) and replaced myself (3 screws) - a repair I have done myself before on other diesel vehicles. $253!!! I have a call in to the service department, which I have used for 15 years, and can hardly wait to hear their excuse. They just lost my business, of course.
I expect lots of local business failures due to customer losses in the face of pricing practices just like this, which now are pandemic throughout America. I'm going to start changing my own oil again, too, just like I used to, after 30 years of having others do it for me. How about you? There goes Jiffy Lube.
I just got a pitch from UCLA's law school for donations. Part of it was a recounting of tuition cost through the years, designed to cause me to want to send in a check. The only thing that it made clear to me is that we mere mortals no longer can afford a professional education and that it is time to close down UCLA's law school!
Though second only to UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall law school in quality for public universities in America, UCLA and Boalt Hall still are publicly-funded colleges, so must be accessible. When I attended UCLA Law School (1979-1982), my total tuition for three years was $2,500. If you started at UCLA law this past fall, you will pay $87,000 in tuition alone before you finish - and that is in-state, resident tuition, too. I can't afford to send my kids to such a school, but you know who gets free rides.
I hurt my back when some dumb cluck teenager backed into my car in a parking lot this past fall, so had to hire others to cut wood for our winter heat. Couldn't get anybody local to respond to my ad offering $10, then $12 per hour, cash. I finally got two guys to commute 1 and 2 hours, respectively, to cut wood for me for $15 per hour.
Maybe there really are jobs that we won't do anymore.
I call the two current generations the "lost generations," because they don't want to work, don't know how to work and won't show up when they agree to work. What America really needs is the financial enema she is about to receive. Unfortunately, a good smacking from World War is going to accompany it, thanks to our friends in the ranks of The Chosen.
Already, we are hurtling into the abyss, folks, and they are doing everything they can to lie to us about it.
Think not? Watch this video of CNBC hacks at work:
http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=605445206
Note how, halfway through, the anchor quickly cuts off the guest when he both accuses the govt of lying in statistics and actually mentions discontinuance of the reporting of M3. Then, shortly after that, the guest says he believes the US economy is a house of cards and that the world is teetering on the brink of financial collapse, whereupon the anchor again steps in, recharacterizes what the guest just said as "recession" and breezily changes the subject for the balance of the interview.
This is how it is done, folks, even when they get someone honest and knowledgable on TV. This is why the average American is just so damned stupid! (Not you, of course. Your mere presence on this site proves you to be far from average.)
The sky isn't falling - it already has fallen and lies about us in broken shards that are obvious if we just open our eyes.
-ed
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